*0 A HISTORY OF 



spectator with such ideas of awful solemnity, as these immense pilM 

 of Nature's erecting, that seem to mock the minuteness of human 

 magnificence. 



In countries where there are nothing but plains, the smallest eleva- 

 tions are apt to excite wonder. In Holland, which is all a flat, they 

 show a little ridge of hills, near the sea-side, which Boerhaave generally 

 marked out to his pupils, as being mountains of no small considera- 

 tion. What would be the sensations of such an auditory, could they 

 at once be presented with a view of the heights and precipices of the 

 Alps or the Andes ! Even among us in England, we have no ade- 

 quate ideas of a mountain-prospect ; our hills are generally sloping 

 from the plain, and clothed to the very top with verdure ; we can 

 scarce, therefore, lift our imaginations to those immense piles, whose 

 tops peep up behind intervening clouds, sharp and precipitate, and 

 reach to heights that human avarice or curiosity have never been able 

 to ascend. 



We, in this part of the world, are not, for that reason, so imme- 

 diately interested in the question which has so long been agitated 

 among philosophers, concerning what gave rise to these inequalities 

 on the surface of the globe. In our own happy region, we generally 

 see no inequalities but such as contribute to use and beauty ; and we, 

 therefore, are amazed at a question, inquiring how such necessary in- 

 equalities came to be formed, and seeming to express a wonder how 

 the globe comes to be so beautiful as we find it. But though with us 

 there may be no great cause for such a demand, yet in those places 

 where mountains deform the face of nature, where they pour down 

 cataracts, or give fury to tempests, there seems to be good reason for 

 inquiry either into their causes or their uses. It has been, therefore, 

 asked by many, in what manner mountains have come to be formed ; 

 or for what uses they are designed ? 



To satisfy curiosity in these respects, much reasoning has been em- 

 ployed, and very little knowledge propagated. With regard to the 

 first part of the demand, the manner in which mountains were formed, 

 we have already seen the conjectures of different philosophers on that 

 dead. One supposing that they were formed from the earth's broken 

 shell at the time of the deluge ; another, that they existed from the 

 creation, and only acquired their deformities in process of time ; a 

 third, that they owed their original to earthquakes ; and still a fourth, 

 with much more plausibility than the rest, ascribing them entire- 

 ly to the fluctuations of the deep, which he supposes in the beginning 

 to have covered the whole earth. Such as are plensed with disquisi- 

 tions of this kind, may consult Burnett, Whiston, Woodward, or Buf- 

 fon. Nor would I be thought to decry any mental amusements, that 

 at worst keep us innocently employed ; but for my own part, I cannot 

 help wondering how the opposite demand has never come to be made ; 

 and why philosophers have never asked how we come to have plains ? 

 Plains are sometimes more prejudicial to man than mountains. Upon 

 plains, an inundation has greater power ; the beams of the sun are 

 often collected there with suffocating fierceness ; they are sometimes 

 found desert for several hundred miles together, as in the country east 

 of the Caspian sea, although otherwise fruitful, merely because therr, 



